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REMINISCENCES 



OF 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 



BY 

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 



[Reprinted from Proceedings of The Cambridge 
Historical Society, I] 



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REMINISCENCES OF OLD CAMBRIDGE 

BEING IN PART THE REPORT OF AN INFORMAL ADDRESS TO THE CAMBRIDGE 
HISTORICAL SOCIETY ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 30, 1905. 

By CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

When the pleasant invitation to speak this evening came to me, 
I hesitated to accept it, but on reflection, I put doubt aside and 
welcomed the opportunity to express my piety for my native town, 
and to say how dear a privilege I count it to have been born in 
Cambridge and to have spent here much the greater part of my life, 
and how deeply I reverence the ancestors who have bequeathed to 
us the blessing of their virtues and the fruits of their labors. Few 



12 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

towns have had a more notable succession of worthies than Cam- 
bridge, and, as a result in large part of the character of these men 
and women, the story of the town contains the record of many 
events not merely of local interest, but such as connect it with the 
history of the country and with the progress of civilization during 
the last two hundred and fifty years. 

Dr. Paige, in his trustworthy " History of Cambridge," says that 
" for nearly two hundred years after its foundation Cambridge in- 
creased very slowly in population and wealth." It was just about 
two hundred years after the foundation that my recollections of 
Cambridge begin. I was three years old in 1830, and the town 
and the townspeople then were in many respects more widely 
different from what they are to-day than they then were from 
what they had been during any part of the preceding one hun- 
dred and fifty years. 

Old Cambridge was still a country village, distinguished from 
other similar villages mainly by the existence of the College, con- 
cerning which Dr. Paige says with dry humor : " The College 
gave employment to several professors, mechanics, and boarding- 
house keepers; " and one may add that it separated Old Cambridge, 
in its social characteristics, from the other sections of the town 
further than its mere local distance from them would justify. 
Wide spaces of wood and swamp and pasture divided Lechmere 
Point, as East Cambridge was then termed, from Cambridgeport, 
and parted both of them from Old Cambridge, — and this physical 
separation was a type of the wider division of interests and asso- 
ciations. 

So great are the changes in the town since my childhood that 
the aspects and conditions of those days seem more than a hfetime 
away. I have the happiness of passing my old age in the house in 
which I was born. It has always been my home ; but when I was 
a boy, it was in the country — now it is suburban and in the heart 
of a city. Kirkland Street was a country road with not a single 
house on its southern side, but with a wide stretch quite over to 
Harvard Street of marsh land and huckleberry pasture, with chan- 
nels running through the thick growth of shrubs, often frozen in 
the winter, and on which we boys used to skate over the very site 
of the building in which we have met to-night. Down as far as to 
Inman Square the region was solitary, while beyond Inman Square, 



1905.] ADDKESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 13 

toward Boston, was an extensive wood of pines with a dense under- 
brush, the haunt, as we boys used to believe, of gamblers and other 
bad characters from the neighboring city, and to be swiftly hurried by 
if nightfall caught us near it. The whole region round my father's 
house was, indeed, so thinly settled that it preserved its original 
rural character. It was rich in wild growth, and well known to 
botanists as the habitat of many rare wild-flowers ; the marshes were 
fragrant in spring with the azalia and the clethra ; and through 
spring, summer, and autumn there was a profuse procession of the 
familiar flowers of New England. It was a favorite resort of birds, 
but there is now little left of it fit for their homes, though many 
of them still revisit in their migrations the noisy locality where 
their predecessors enjoyed a peaceful and retired abode. 

But even a greater change than that from country village to 
suburban town has taken place here in Old Cambridge in the last 
seventy years. The people have changed. In my boyhood the 
population was practically all of New England origin, and in large 
proportion Cambridge-born, and inheritors of Old Cambridge tra- 
ditions. The fruitful invasion of barbarians had not begun. The 
foreign-born people could be counted up on the fingers. There 
was Rule, the excellent Scotch gardener, who was not without points 
of resemblance to Andrew Fairservice ; there was Sweetman, the 
one Irish day-laborer, faithful and intelligent, trained as a boy in 
one of the "hedge-schools " of his native Ireland, and ready to lean 
on his spade and put the troublesome schoolboy to a test on the 
Odes of Horace, or even on the Arma virumque cano ; and at the 
heart of the village was the hair-cutter Marcus Reamie, from some 
unknown foreign land, with his shop full, in a boy's eyes, of treas- 
ures, some of his own collecting, some of them brought fi*om dis- 
tant romantic parts of the world by his sailor son. There were 
doubtless other foreigners, but I do not recall them, except a few 
. teachers of languages in the College, of whom three filled in these 
and later years an important place in the life of the town, — Dr. 
Beck, Dr, Follen, and Mr. Sales. But the intermixture of foreign 
elements was so small as not to affect the character of the town ; 
in fact, everybody knew not only everybody else in person, but also 
much of everybody's tradition, connections, and mode of life. It 
has been a pathetic experience for me to live all my life in one com- 
munity and to find myself gradually becoming a stranger to it, and 



14 THE CAMBEIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

with good but new neighbors, some of whom do not know that I 
am not as recent a comer to the town as themselves. 

I have the pleasure of seeing before me an old friend, one of 
the most honored sons of Cambridge. He and I are now two 
of the oldest of the native-born inhabitants of the town. We were 
born, respectively, at the opposite ends of what is now Kirkland 
Street, and was then known by the more characteristic name of 
Professors' Row. The pleasant house in which Colonel Higgin- 
son was born still stands, — the last in the row toward Harvard 
Square, facing the Delta and the Yard. Between the house of 
Colonel Higginson's father and that of my father, when the Colo- 
nel and I were little boys, there were but four houses on Profes- 
sors' Pow, each of them occupied by a professor, the last toward 
my father's house being that on the corner of Divinity Avenue, 
lately occupied by Mr. Houghton, then by the Rev. Dr. Henry 
Ware, Sr,, a venerable man, whose numerous descendants give evi- 
dence that among them the doctrine of original sin finds no support. 
Professors' Row, or Kirkland Street, was a part of what was known 
as the Old Charlestown Road, — the oldest and most interesting 
road in the Commonwealth. When Winthrop's company of immi- 
grants arrived in 1630, and part of it settled at Charlestown, and 
part went up the river, to make their new home at a place on its 
bank which they called Watertown, in order to establish communi- 
cation between the two settlements a path was cut through the 
five or six miles of woods which lay between them. By degrees, 
as the country became peopled, this path became an open road, and 
to distinguish it from other thoroughfares it was called " the Old 
Charlestown Road." If the names of the people who have trav- 
elled over it were written out, the record would be a list of the 
chief worthies of the Commonwealth from its beginning to the 
present day, at first on foot or on horseback, or with ox-teams, 
later in one-horse chaises, and later still in the chariots of govern- 
ors or notables who had established their homes along that part 
of the line which we know as Brattle Street. Few feet have trav- 
elled the Kirkland Street part of the road oftener than mine, and 
many an otherwise dull and commonplace walk has had its dulness 
relieved by the silent and invisible companionship of some one of 
these old travellers. 

Professors' Row would deserve fame even if the record of emi- 



1905.] ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 15 

nent men and women who have lived for a longer or shorter time 
upon it extended no farther back than my own memory, for it 
would include two Henry Wares, three Presidents of the Univer- 
sity (Sparks, Felton, and Eliot), many distinguished professors, 
among them that admirable scholar and delightful man, my class- 
mate and dear friend, Francis James Child. A little earlier than 
he was Longfellow, who on his first coming to Cambridge, in 
1836, took rooms in the house of Professor Stearns, which has 
only lately been moved to give place to the New Lecture hall. 
That large, square, three-story house afforded several suites of 
pleasant rooms, and has probably been the home for a time of more 
men whose names are well known in the annals of the College and 
the Commonwealth than any other in Cambridge. My earliest rec- 
ollections of Mr. Lonfyfellow are of the time when he was livincj 
there, and nothing but my later recollections of him could be 
pleasanter than those which I have of his kindness, — he a man of 
thirty to a boy of eight or ten years old. I still preserve among 
my treasures gifts he made me in those days for the enrichment of 
my little museum, — precious objects which he had brought home 
from Europe, the most interesting of all of them, perhaps, being a 
seventeenth century medal of the three kings of Cologne, whose 
legend and names are familiar to the readers of his " Golden 
Legend." 

Twenty years later (Oxford Street had been laid out meanwhile) 
Lowell took up his abode in the next house to the west, then owned 
and occupied by his brother-in-law. Dr. Estes Howe, now occupied 
by Professor Peabody; and here he lived for four or five years. 
Kirkland Street grew to know him well. No one ever loved his 
native town better than he, or was more familiar with it ; and when 
I recall the innumerable walks we had together for many and many 
a year, not only when he was resident at Dr. Howe's, but during 
the longer period when his home was at Elmwood, one of the 
tenderest stanzas that Cowley wrote comes into my mind as 
curiously appropriate to them, alike in word and in sentiment: — 

" Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say- 
Have ye not seen us walking every day ? 
Was there a tree about which did not know 
The love betwixt us two ? " 



16 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

The fields, alas, grow scantier and scantier. In my boyhood, the 
whole space between Elm wood and the old Brattle House, now 
standing squeezed and rather disconsolate at the corner of Brattle 
and Hawthorn streets, was open field, mainly pasture-land, while 
on the other end of the way between Elmwood and Shady Hill, 
almost the whole space between Divinity Avenue and the Middle- 
sex Turnpike, which ran behind my father's house, was similar 
open ground, stretching, wood and swamp, sandpit and field, 
along both sides of the willow-bordered Turnpike, far up, nearly 
to the then noted Porter's Tavern, which gave its name in later 
days to Porter's, or North Cambridge, Station. 

But I must return to Professors' Row, in order to speak of the 
occupants of the house next on the east to that of Professor Stearns, 
— the home of Professor and Mrs. John Farrar. The house has 
recently come into the possession of the University, and has been 
this very year transformed and improved by changes made in it. 
But in the transformation it has lost the historic and quaintly 
monumental character given to it by its lofty wooden columns, so 
that the ghosts of its former occupants, should they pass along this 
way, might gaze with some bewilderment on its changed appear- 
ance. Professor Farrar was a noted mathematician in his day, a 
kindly, good man, but socially a less considerable person than his 
wife, Mrs. Eliza Farrar, who was a figure of real importance in the 
Cambridge circle for more than thirty years. Mrs. Farrar was a 
daughter of Mr. Benjamin Rotch of New Bedford. Soon after his 
marriage her father had gone to England and established himself 
there in good business and pleasant social relations, and there 
her childhood and youth were passed. She was essentially of 
English breeding and an excellent representative of the cultivated 
and intelligent women, English or American, of the first half of 
the last century. I might describe her to one of my own genera- 
tion as being like what one might imagine the mother of Harry 
and Lucy to have been ; but I fear the actual generation is not so 
familiarly acquainted with Miss Edgeworth's admirable characters 
as to know for what their names stand. It is for something very 
good at its time, but which, at least in America, has almost disap- 
peared. In such a woman as Mrs. Farrar it might perhaps be 
defined as a mingling of English Utilitarianism and American 
Unitarianism, with an English tradition of good manners and an 



1905.] ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 17 

American freedom from purely conventional standards. Having 
no Harry or Lucy of her own to bring up, she turned her gifts to 
the service of the children of the community. She wrote a volume 
which I remember as of absorbing interest for those for whom it 
was intended called " The Child's Robinson Crusoe ; " another of 
her excellent books was " The Youths' Letter- Writer," and another 
still, "The Young Ladies' Friend," full of good sense and plain 
counsel, each of which would be as useful to the present generation 
of girl-undergraduates as it was to their grandmothers, for whom 
the doors of the home had not been opened that they might go forth 
for good or for ill to seek entrance into the Women's College. 

Another professor's wife with literary gifts and of motherly 
warmth of heart was the American wife of the excellent Dr. Follen, 
who, coming to Harvard from his native Germany, in 1825, not 
only quickened by his ardent enthusiasm zeal for the study of the 
German language and literature, but roused interest in gymnastics, 
and was instrumental in introducing the intelligent practice of 
them after the German method among the students of the College. 
The Delta, then an unoccupied field, was the exercise ground, and 
bars and poles and other gymnastic apparatus were erected upon 
it, remnants of which existed for many years. Mrs. Follen was a 
writer of charming verses for the nursery and of pleasant stories 
for elder children, one of which, called " The Well-Spent Hour," 
was a great favorite. 

Other ladies belonging to the same social circle, as the two I 
have mentioned, possessed similar cultivation and literary taste, 
and made part of the group of men and women around the College 
which formed a society of exceptional pleasantness and of pure 
New England type. Few artificial distinctions existed in it ; but 
the progress of democracy had not swept away the natural dis- 
tinctions of good breeding and superior culture. The best tradi- 
tions of the older days of New England were still maintained, and 
formed a common background of association and of mutual under- 
standing. Its informing spirit was liberal and cheerful ; there was 
general contentment and satisfaction with things as they were ; 
there was much hopefulness and confidence that in the New 
World, in New England at least, men had entered not merely 
upon a land of promise, but one in which the promise Avas already 
in considerable measure fulfilled. There were evils, no doubt, but 

2 



18 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

they were not threatening of disaster. Tlie most perplexing prob- 
lems of society seemed to be in large measure solved ; the future, 
though not absolutely cloudless, wore, for the most part, a fair 
aspect. 

A broad statement of conditions such as this requires modifica- 
tions to make it correct in particulars ; but it at least indicates the 
prevailing temper of the time as.it was manifest in the little circle 
of Old Cambridge society. The change was soon to come, but in 
the days of which I am speaking, there was simplicity of life in its 
best sense. The households were homes of thrift without parsi- 
mony, of hospitality without extravagance, of culture without pre- 
tence. The influence of the College gave to the society a bookish 
turn, and there was much reading, — much more of the reading 
which nourishes the intelligence than in these days of newspapers, 
magazines, and cheap novels. Everybody in the Cambridge circle 
was interested, for instance, in the quarterly numbers of the North 
American Review^ each of which was likely to contain more than 
one article by a friend or neighbor. The standard of literary judg- 
ment set up in England was generally respected, and the Edinhirgh 
Review was hardly less commonly read than the North American, 
and its verdicts were even more readily accepted. 

Pleasant and cultivated as was the little circle of Cambridge 
society, it did not escape the defects incident to its conditions of 
comparative isolation. The neighborhood of Boston was, indeed, 
of advantage to it, for though the animating spirit of the little city 
was in many respects still characteristically provincial, yet its 
varied interests and active intelligence exercised a generally liber- 
alizing influence. At the time of which I am speaking, the re- 
lations of city and College had become more intimate than ever 
through the election to the presidency of the College of Josiah 
Quincy, who had just rounded out by a term of five years as Mayor 
of Boston a long and distinguished career of public service. He 
was, in truth, as Mr. Lowell termed him, "a great public character," 
and he had the aspect of one — he stood erect, a fine, commanding 
figure of six feet of vigorous manhood. He possessed the bearing 
which we attribute to the gentlemen of distinction of the early 
days of the Republic, a bearing of dignity, combined with scrupu- 
lous courtesy. He and his admirable wife occupied the first ])lace 
in the little world of Old Cambridge, and kept it in touch with the 



1905.] ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 19 

bigger world of Boston, for, in becoming President of Harvard, 
Mr. Quincy did not give up all business in the city, whose affairs 
he had administered so well. It was his habit to drive himself to 
town in his high-hung chaise, and, after attending to business there, 
to drive out in time for dinner at two or three o'clock. Often 
he held the reins loose, and closing his eyes, let his steady horse, 
unguided, bring him out along the. comparatively little frequented 
road. After passing the old West Boston toll-bridge, which 
Longfellow has eternized in his lovely little poem, " The Bridge," 
and getting beyond the few brick houses at its hither end, there 
was a bleak, solitary stretch across the salt marshes before one 
reached the tliickly settled centre of Cambridgeport, with its numer- 
ous big taverns and great, square stores mainly filled with country 
produce and West India goods. On the outskirts toward Old 
Cambridge stood the fine old Inman house with its long, elm- 
bordered avenue stretching back as far as to the Middlesex Turn- 
pike at the point which we now know as Inman Square, After 
passing this house there was a half-mile of road, with hardly a 
house on either side, till you came to the mansion of Judge Dana, 
which, set on a terrace, crowned tlie height, far higher than now, 
of Dana Hill. Beyond this was a short, solitary strip of road 
through rough pastures on either hand, as far as the Bishop's house, 
which stood where it still stands on the left, with the Old Parson- 
age facing it on the right hand, and then, passing on the same side 
the famous old Wigglesworth house, you came to the President's 
house at the very entrance to Harvard Square, or, as it was then 
called, the Market-place, — plainly, the whole way was a tolerably 
safe road for a trustworthy horse to travel without much guidance 
from his master's hand. 

The President's house, known now as Wadsworth house, and so 
named after its first occupant. President Wadsworth (from 1725 to 
1736), is little changed in outer aspect, save by the deplorable cut- 
ting off in recent years of the lilac-filled front courtyard which 
separated it from the narrow street. At the back it had a pleasant 
garden, surrounded by a high board fence, stretching into the 
present College Yard so far as to include a part, at least, of the site 
of Gray's Hall. The President's office was in the upper story 
of the annex to the main house, still standing but moved from its 
original position. 



20 THE CAMBKIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

The relations of President Quincy to the students through his 
whole administration, 1829 to 1845, were excellent. The number of 
undergraduates was still small enough to admit of his having some 
personal acquaintance with most of them. The esprit de corps was 
strong in the College, and the President's relations to the students 
were much like that of a colonel to the men of his regiment who 
feel that, though he commands them, he is still one with them in 
interest and in sympathy. President Quincy was wise enough to be 
patient with the students' faults, and had humor enough to smile 
at their follies. They regarded him with a respect which his force 
of character and his distinguished career and personal bearing 
naturally inspired, together with a certain affectionate pride as the 
worthy head and representative of the famous institution in whose 
honor they themselves had share. More still, he interested them 
as a personage already vested with historic dignity, — he connected 
the modern time with the heroic past, he had been born four years 
prior to the Declaration of Independence ; in his youth he had 
known the great men of the great time, and while alike in 
principles and in manners he maintained the traditions of that 
period, he kept abreast of the conditions of the later day. He often 
put the shy student at his ease by saying to him, " I knew your 
grandfather, sir, and I am happy now to know you." His numer- 
ous cares and many avocations did not interfere with his sympathy 
in small matters, nor with his kindly thoughtfulness for the petty 
interests of " his boys." I had an experience of this, so character- 
istic and so pleasant that I am led to tell it, though it relates to 
myself. 

During my freshman year, I was obliged to be absent from Col- 
lege for two or three months, owing to trouble in my eyes. I 
returned to my class at the beginning of the sophomore year, but 
the absence had deprived me of the hope of receiving a Detur, — 
that is, one of the books given out in the autumn to such students 
as have done well during their first year. It was a disappointment, 
for the Detur, in its handsome binding, bearing the College seal, is 
a coveted prize. On the morning after the Deturs had been given 
out, the freshman who served the President as his messenger came 
to my room with word that the President wished to see me at his 
office. Even to the most exemplary of students, such a summons 
is not altogether welcome, for " use every one after his desert and 



1905.] ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT [N^ORTON 21 

who sliould 'scape whipping?" I went accordingly with some 
trembling, knocked, entered, and was received with the President's 
usual slightly gruff salutation, "Well, Sir, what's your name?" 
Then, as he looked up and saw who it was, " Ah, yes, Norton. 
Well, I sent for you, Norton, because I was sorry that under the 
rules'l could not present you yesterday with a Detur. It was not 
your fault, and so, as a token of my personal approbation, I have 
got a book for you which may perhaps take the place of the Detur," 
— and he handed me a prettily bound copy of Campbell's Poems in 
which he had written his name and my own with a few pleasant 
words of approval. I have received many gifts in my long life, but 
hardly one which aroused a stronger sense of personal gratitude to 
the giver, or which has afforded me more pleasure. It was no 
wonder that President Quincy established a firm hold upon the 
affection as well as the respect of the students. 

Harvard Square, on the edge of which stands Wadsworth house, 
had not received its present appellation in President Quincy's day. 
It was known then as the Market-place. Here was the general 
market of country produce, especially of wood and hay, loads of 
which drawn by oxen were brought in almost every morning for the 
villao-e supply, taking their stand under one of the two noble elms 
which gave their beauty to the Square. The market proper was a 
small building near the middle of the Square, but I have no recol- 
lection of it; and in my early days the meat market, or butcher's 
shop, was in the basement of the old Court House which stood tdl 
1840 on the site since then occupied by Lyceum Hall, and, so far as 
dignity of design and picturesqueness of effect are concerned, was 
vastly superior to the ugly building that usurped its place. Indeed, 
Harvard Square is far inferior in pleasantness of aspect to the 
village Market-place which it has superseded. 

Here was the centre of the active life of the village. Where the 
car station is now was Willard's Tavern, in front of which the 
primitive omnibus awaited passengers before starting on its journey, 
then an hour in length, to Boston. I do not recall when the trips 
began to be made hourly, but I think there were only four round 
trips the day at the earliest of my recollections. The road during 
the winter and spring was apt to be very heavy, with frequent mud 
holes into which the wheels might easily sink to their hubs. 
Scarcely any of the residents in Cambridge carried on business in 



22 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

Boston or had daily employment there. An occasional trip to the 
city was all that was needed by Deacon Farwell to keep up the 
stock of goods in his excellent dry-goods shop, at the corner of 
the Market-place, and the road to Brighton ; nor was Deacon Brown 
compelled to go often to Boston by the requirements of his old- 
fashioned store of West India goods and groceries, at the corner 
of Dunster Street. Hilliard and Gray, the University booksellers 
and publishers, occupied the corner store on Holyoke Street in the 
brick block which had recently been erected, and next them was 
the post-office, with a postmaster whose first commission dated 
back to the first administration of Washington. A httle way down 
Holyoke Street, on the western side, stood the University Press, 
then, or soon after, under the management of the cultivated gentle- 
man and scholar, Charles Folsom, whose admirable taste controlled 
the issues of the Press and secured for them a high reputation. 

The stores I have mentioned, with a few others of hardly less 
note, and some pleasant small shops kept by women, supplied most 
of the modest wants of the village, and with the strong attraction 
of the post-office and, perhaps to not a few, the still stronger 
attraction of Willard's bar-room, drew almost everybody on every 
week day to the Square. Here one would meet most of those 
village and College characters whom Mr. Lowell has commemo- 
rated so delightfully in his " Cambridge Thirty Years Ago." Fifty 
years have passed since that admirable essay was written. Even 
then, the original Old Cambridge had almost vanished, and now 
not one of those characters to whom it gave happy literary immor- 
tality survives in the flesh. The last to go was that sweet humor- 
ist, John Holmes ; and with him the last light of the real Old 
Cambridge was extinguished. The village traditions, all of which 
he had inherited and improved, ceased with him ; — so long as he 
lived, the legends of two hundred years still survived as if con- 
temporary stories : with his death, many an Old Cambridge ghost, 
whom he had tenderly cherished, was laid away, never again to 
be summoned from its dim abode. No son of hers was more loyal 
to Old Cambridge than he, and it would have pleased him to be 
assured that his memory would become, as I believe it has become, 
part of the cherished tradition of his native town. 

The Old Cambridge of to-day is a new Cambridge to us of the 
elder generation; and I can form no better wish for its children 



\ 

1905.] ADDRESS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 23 

than that they may have as good reason to love and to honor 
their native city as we of the old time had for loving our native 
villasce. 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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